Dementia Journal, 9/5/16 in Daydreaming on the Porch

I’ve been in some of the strangest and most introspective moods lately. Sometimes sad and depressed, but mostly rather stoical. It seemed to start when I crossed a very significant psychological threshold this past April when I turned 65. For the first time in my life I actually was really shocked by an age “number.” Age is just a “number,” right? Well, no. Not for me, not when you suddenly are 65. I know it’s foolish to feel this way, but this has been a very strange and difficult year.

I seem to be caught between two worlds: one is the world of work and other people I help during the course of my work days, and the other is my work at home as the primary caregiver for my mother. She is now 92. She and our 19-year-old cat, Ginger are my family now. For years now I have been up all hours of the night helping her use the portable commode next to her bed. (Three times so far tonight). She needs help doing everything. While I am doing that I am reassuring her that she’s at home and that she will be okay.

“Are you my son?” she’ll often ask me now. I’m always on call. Always on guard at home. Lately, she’ll spend hours questioning me fervently about where her sisters are. They passed away many years ago. She wants to know who her children are. Where they live. Whether they come to see her. The other night she pressed me urgently about my father and what he died of and whether she was responsible for his cancer. And on and on. I get numb repeating the answers I spontaneously provide. And I MUST respond to every question, even if they are repeated ten times in the course of a half hour. It’s truly exhausting physically, but more than that it’s just emotionally draining. Sometimes I just don’t feel anything.

At work, I’m away from home, yet home. I never really leave her, even though we have five caregivers whose constant presence with her when I’m not there enables me to go to my job of 20 years day after day. I’m enormously thankful for that. I really think it’s what keep me sane, whatever that word means. Work gives me social contact even though I could retire any time and be free during the day to do what I want (assuming we continue to keep all the caregivers). But I’m afraid to do that, frankly. I’m not yet ready to give up work which is my main source of pride in myself. I feel good that I can take care of Mom with as much stamina as I have, but I also feel guilt that I am often so impatient and cross with her. I lose my temper. I am a very imperfect son.

So, my family is my elderly mother and our elderly cat, both of whom I dearly love. My co-workers, some of whom I have worked with for almost 20 years, are also like family to me. You get the picture..

I move between these two worlds, and mostly I am so busy going to an fro from one to another that I don’t have time to be really alone with my thoughts and feelings. I don’t have the luxury to do or be nothing for hours on end, if that’s what I feel like doing. When at home, I’m always looking at my watch to see how much time I have before a caregiver’s shift ends.

Yesterday I was at the state park sitting on a bench by the lake. For the first time since June it was not scorching hot and there was a pleasant and cooling breeze. I got up from the bench to take some pictures of dragonflies. I sat down and tried deliberately to just daydream for a while and not get out my smartphone and read news, email or Websites, or open up those tantalizing apps. That used to be the natural thing to do — sit quietly by myself and think. Not anymore. Gotta be fiddling with something, reading this or that, checking text messages and so on. Yesterday, however, I was successful. I just sat and thought about things for a little while. Amazing!

That was nice, and I remembered how it used to be long ago. But the lack of activity was somewhat strange. I was vaguely unsettled. There were only a couple of other people in the whole park that afternoon. But I rather like having the whole place, all 200 or however many acres there are in the park, to myself. I can think the deepest and saddest thoughts. I embark on little short-lived journeys. The dragonflies danced in the sunlight along the lake’s edge, and I sat there alone, again.

This is me, circa 1984, out in the countryside near Seattle.

A familiar sight during my walks at the state park:

Last updated September 06, 2016